Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Just try new things. Don’t be afraid. Step out of your comfort zones and soar, all right?

If you are lucky enough to find something that you love, and you have a shot at being good at it, don’t stop, don’t put it down.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Let us be shy no longer. Let us go to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new age is not only possible but probable.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

My whole life is a theater piece.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

No one can resist the idea of a crippled genius.

I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without my ever seeking it.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

I am the freest author in the world.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

A useless life is an early death.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Life is anything but predictable.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you – gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

We represent a hustler. I think we represent inspiration. I think we represent, you know, staying down. I think we represent building yourself up from the bootstraps.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.